Seymour Chwast

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Seymour Chwast was born in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union, where he studied illustration and graphic design. He is a founding partner of the celebrated Push Pin Studios, whose distinct style has had a worldwide influence on contemporary visual communications. The studio’s name was changed to The Pushpin Group, of which Chwast is the director.

Chwast’s clients have included leading corporations, advertising agencies and publishing companies both in the US and abroad. His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, corporate and environmental graphics, publications, posters, packaging and record covers. He created background images for the production of Candide at Lincoln Center in New York, and The Philadelphia Opera Company production of The Magic Flute. He has designed and illustrated over thirty children’s books and has developed several typefaces. Issues were collected in The Push Pin Graphic, a book published by Chronicle which also published Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast. Abrams published a book of his work, The Left-Handed Designer.

His designs and illustrations have been exhibited in major galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, Japan, Brazil and Russia. Chwast and Push Pin were honored at the Louvre in Paris in a two-month retrospective exhibition titled The Push Pin Style. He has had several one-man shows of his paintings, sculptures and prints in the US. His posters are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum of The Smithsonian Institution, The Library of Congress, The Gutenberg Museum and The Israel Museum, among others.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded him the medal for 1985. He has an honorary Ph.D in Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design and is in the Art Directors Hall of Fame.

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